The Provost’s Office invited me to give a presentation on my research at Paju Bookcity in the Orozco Room @ 66 W 12th Street on Tuesday, October 16, from noon to 1:30.

I’m chairing a panel on “Designing Multisensory Exhibitions” at the “Multimodal Approaches to Learning” conference at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, October 27.

I’ve been invited to participate in the “Media Places: Infrastructure | Place | Media” symposium @ HUMlab in Umeå, Sweden, in early December.

I’ll probably go to SCMS in Chicago for a workshop and a panel in March.

And in May I’m giving a keynote at the “Spectacular/Ordinary/Contested Media City” conference, hosted by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland

I know there’s more stuff I’m forgetting!

Looking forward to these events — exciting though they are — means I have to leave my summer behind. Teaching my first class yesterday afternoon brought that reality into sharp relief. It’s a difficult transition. I had a fabulous summer — full of travel to exciting places, new friends, lots of fabulous art, an incredible amount of time to myself and my books. Oh, and summer brought tenure: can’t forget that!

All of my summers are very musical, in large part because I have a little more time to seek out new music, and I tend to see a few more shows in the summertime than I do during the academic year. But this summer was particularly musical, due in large part, I imagine, to the fact that I was alone, in foreign lands for much of the time, and I spent a good deal of time with my headphones. So I feel compelled to pay homage — and say goodbye — to the songs that defined the Summer of 2012 for me. I say adieu not because I’ll never hear them again, but because I’ll forever more hear them with a sense of loss and longing — for never-to-be-repeated experiences in perhaps never-to-be-revisited places.

I first heard Diiv’s How Long Have You Known back in May, before my summer adventures began, and I recall declaring (to myself) on the spot: This is bound be my summer song. And it was. I missed their show in Montréal because I was preparing for a big public lecture I was giving the next day. I was then invited to private show in Brooklyn and missed that, too — because I was in Montréal. Bah. I didn’t realize until recently that they played my brother- and sister-in-law’s Oh My Rockness show at CMJ last year. But I missed that, too, because of some school event.

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In a similar swirly mode is Echo Lake’sEven the Blind. Most folks who are familiar with my musical tastes know that I like very few bands fronted by female vocalists, but this one works.

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I had discovered Lemonade’s Neptune back in the spring, too — but, again, I knew this would be a warm-weather jam. Lemonade weather. I don’t know where these guys went to college, but I fancy this song to be Wesleyan R&B.

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And now a band i did manage to see in-concert: Japandroids. Perfect for all those glorious, anthematic moments of summer — like when I was in Korea and frequently found myself saying, “Damn, did I just climb another mountain?!?”

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Speaking of anthematic: in the midst of Olympic season, it seemed only fitting to dig a band called Elite Gymnastics. Turns out their music is rather anti- anthematic. Still, I loved the variations-on-a-theme approach to their Ruins album, and found the Here in Heaven remixes quite enchanting.

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Finally, a guilty pleasure. I heard 2NE1’s I Love You literally everywhere I went in Korea, and eventually came to realize that it’s a fantastically catchy song. (Ran was quite pleased by my K-Pop conversion.) I particularly love the “bring it back” moment at 2:45. I listen to that segment on repeat.

MY FALL 2015 CLASSES

I'm teaching two new courses: "Maps as Media," a hybrid seminar-studio, a reincarnation of my old "Urban Media Archaeology" class; and, with architect Annie Barrett, "Library Think Tank," another hybrid seminar-studio hosted through Parsons Architecture, but open to all graduate students